Almost immediately after learning that I had been invited to participate in the third iteration of the Inkhaven writing fellowship – which is organized around an imperative that all participants must publish an original piece of at least five hundred words on each day of the fellowship’s duration – I found myself facing a set of unsurprising (but surprisingly difficult) questions:

What did I want to write about? I am a writer by trade, but like many writers by trade, the writing that I produce to support myself is not often the writing that I would produce outside of the constraints imposed by the need to continue drawing a paycheck, or to not get kicked out of my graduate program. Somewhere along the line, writing had become a job, something that I did out of a different kind of necessity than that which used to impel me to attempt to pour myself onto the page. Facing the opportunity to write for the love of writing, I found myself drawing a blank.

Where would I publish these pieces? I have never had a blog of my own, in large part because I have never felt the urge to be a blogger. The closest that I have come was writing a staff column for my college newspaper – an experience that I cherished, but not one that required me to claim a public platform for myself. I have also written reviews of various sorts, spent a brief stint as a political journalist, published a few pieces on commission, and written or coauthored various essays in my role running strategic communications for a small systems engineering firm (a role I took on due to a desire to develop an authentic understanding of my topic before writing the dissertation on the intersection[s] between artificial intelligence and literature that I am currently in the process of completing). I have taught writing classes, edited others’ essays, read poetry in genuinely public settings, and tweeted promiscuously. None of these experiences, however, provides a venue for the kind of work that Inkhaven expects from its participants.

Why did I think that I should do this? I miss the relationship to words that I had when I was younger, wandering around in an oversize corduroy jacket with a book of poems in one pocket and a play in the other, drinking up all of the language that I could because I believed with all of my heart that words alone could save me from something that I did not yet know how to name – but now recognize as nothing more exotic than loneliness, the failure to connect and fear that that failure would be permanent. I wanted to remember that self, to put its pieces back together, to fumble my way back into a body that yearned to write, that polished phrases like a first pair of good shoes or silver on the night before a dinner party. I wanted to punish myself, albeit playfully, for having let Claude into the innermost sanctum of my mind, in the hope that l could wash its walls clean with a torrent of text drawn from a wellspring that I had nearly forgotten to tap into.

Who the fuck am I? Now this is where things got interesting! I realized that I was utterly unwilling to attempt to answer the question directly, but incredibly eager to let my writing answer it for me, or rather, to attempt to answer it through the act of writing, and the fact of the writing which that act would produce. Furthermore, I realized that this meant, somewhat ironically, that I would need to abstract myself as I currently understood myself away from that writing; I would have to write as someone else in order to write my way (back) to myself. In short, I would need a pen name – not as a persona to perform, but as a blank slate that would be gradually filled in only with the words that I wrote. If I wanted this fellowship to teach me how to represent myself in new ways, I would need to start by erasing a sense of self that had become overly familiar.

Thus Ziggy I. Ptelefreako burst out of my forehead like some weird Athena as I drove to the airport to catch my flight to California: autonymy as a first step on the long road back to autonomy of voice and thought. The name carries associations, but those associations are ancillary – a frame within which I might bring myself into focus, rather than a prefabricated identity to inhabit.

“Ziggy” because it is a name shared by a bizarrely wide array of artists whose work I admire: the late Lady Stardust, of course, but also Sigmund Freud, Dziga Vertov, and Vilmos Zsigmond.

I like to tell people that the “I.” stands for Ishmael. It doesn’t really, but that’s okay. It might stand for “I” (a proper pseudonym, I believe, ought to undermine itself on the conceptual level in one way or another) but it also might stand for something else entirely (after all, I feel strongly that a proper pseudonym ought not undermine itself too decisively).

Ptelefreako (pronounced “Telefreako”; the P is silent) is a tip of the hat to pterodactyls, which have always been my favorite dinosaur; to Senator-Elect James Talarico of Texas, who is playing a fascinating role in contemporary American politics and had the exceptional luck of being given a badass nickname by his opponents; and to my own obsessions with both media theory and non-linear time. I also did not want to compromise my SEO by competing directly with Senator Talafreako, long may he reign.

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Critic as Artist. “Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” I am not sure that Wilde was right about masks, however. It is worth noting that he published his writings under his own given name (albeit truncated to exclude his three middle names, presumably because “Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde” is far too much to reasonably expect anyone to say in casual conversation). Furthermore, The Critic as Artist presents itself as a dialogue between two imaginary personae, Gilbert and Ernest, who disagree with one another throughout the very conversation in which Wilde-as-Gilbert asserts a privileged relationship between masking and authenticity; Wilde frequently contradicts what he has said while wearing one mask upon donning the other, suggesting that the reality of the situation may be more complicated than the aphorism implies. A mask may help its wearer access the truth, but it is not a mechanism that necessarily produces it.

Insofar as Ziggy I. Ptelefreako is a mask, I mean to weave him out of half-silvered mirror: transparent on the side I present to the world, reflective on the side that faces me; a covering that serves to clarify rather than to veil.